The Girl With the Golden Eyes Read Free Page A

them somewhere else, if they have any, before they descend every morning to the depths of the suffering that afflicts families. For them, there are no mysteries, they see the other side of the society for which they are confessors, and they despise it. Yet whatever they do, by dint of pitting themselves against corruption, they come to loathe it and are aggrieved by it; or else, out of weariness, by a secret transaction, they wed it. Ultimately, necessarily, they grow bored with all emotions, these peoplewhom laws, people, institutions make fly down like crows onto corpses still warm. At any time of day, the money-man weighs the living, the contract-man weighs the dead, the law-man weighs our conscience. Obliged to talk continually, they replace ideas with words, emotions with phrases, and their soul turns into a larynx. They wear themselves down and grow demoralized. Neither the great negotiator, nor the judge, nor the lawyer keeps his heart in the right place: They stop feeling, they apply rules that bribes distort. Carried away by their torrential existence, they can be neither husbands nor fathers nor lovers; they glide on a sledge over the things of life, and live every minute compelled by the affairs of the great city. When they return home, they are called upon to attend a ball, or the Opéra, or parties where they go to develop clients for themselves, or acquaintances, or protectors. They all eat to excess, play, stay up late, till their faces grow round, smooth, red. To such terrible expenditures of intellectual strength, to such an increase in moral contradictions, they oppose not pleasure—too pale, flat, without contrast—but debauchery, a secret, terrifying debauchery, since they have everything at their disposal, and they are the ones that create society’s morals. Their actual stupidity is hidden beneath an expert science. They know their profession, but they ignore anythingunconnected with their profession. So, to protect their self-esteem, they call everything into question, criticize right and left; seem skeptical but are actually gullible, and drown their minds in interminable discussions. Almost all of them adopt convenient social, literary, or political prejudices so as to dispense with having to form an opinion of their own, just as they place their conscience in the shelter of common law, or of the commercial court. Having left home early in order to become remarkable men, they become mediocre, and crawl along on the heights of society. Accordingly, their faces present us with this sour pallor, these false complexions, these dull, lined eyes, these talkative and sensual mouths where the observer recognizes the symptoms of the degeneration of thought and its turning round and round in the dull circle of specialization that kills the generative faculties of the brain, the gift of seeing the big picture, of generalizing and deducing. They almost all shrivel up in the furnace of business affairs. Never can a man who has let himself be caught up in the crushing gears of these immense machines become great. If he is a doctor, either he has practiced little medicine, or he is an exception, a Bichat who dies young. If, as a great merchant, there’s still something left, he is almost a financier like Jacques Coeur. Did Robespierre practice law? Danton was a lazy man who bided histime. But who in any case has ever envied the figures of Danton or Robespierre, superb as they may be? These busy men par excellence draw money to themselves and amass it in order to ally themselves with aristocratic families. If the worker’s ambition is the same as a man of the lower middle class, here too passions are the same. In Paris, vanity epitomizes all the passions. The classic example of this level of society is either the ambitious bourgeois, who, after a life full of constant anxiety and maneuvering, gets onto the Council of State the way an ant crawls through a crack; or some newspaper editor, riddled with intrigues,